Last updated 05:38, Friday, 05 September 2008

IT isn’t over until it’s over and what is clear at Carlisle’s stalled airport development right now is that no fat lady is tuning up to sing just yet.

A newly packaged planning application will be tabled next month, in high hopes of a public inquiry and the further delay that would force abandonment of Stobart Air’s scheme being avoided.

Airport director Richard Gordon calls this latest move in the long running saga: “The last throw of the dice.”

The dice has been thrown many times before. All parties with interests – be they financial or emotional – in this controversial £35m investment have seen patience and energies wearing thin. But the additional element of further, bigger injections of new money and the creation of many more jobs in Cumbria, weighs in with endorsement of what always was at the heart of the airport development argument.

A Canadian company considering a £250 million investment in Cumbria says an airport in Carlisle would be crucial to its decision.

World Bio Fibre Technology Inc’s Carlisle-born vice president Peter Jardine says his company is keen to build a ‘green’ power plant in Cumbria, with the creation of more than 120 permanent jobs.

But the obstacles stalling Andrew Tinkler’s plans have made directors hesitate and think again.

It was perhaps never going to be easily written in tablets of stone that a fully functioning modern airport in Carlisle would immediately act as a magnet for new business and guaranteed prosperity. But that new business might be put off by theatrically demonstrated resistance to change and progression, was surely a given.

The clock is ticking on Andrew Tinkler’s Christmas deadline. If by the end of the year he has no progress, the fat lady will be out of rehearsal.

And if there is no airport plan, it seems likely there’ll be no new investment from Canada. In hard times such as these, those are very heavy losses for economically fragile Cumbria.